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| Ann Truong, auditioning for the part of Savannah in Sonnigsburg |
We wanted to create Australia’s first supernatural drama.
Back when we started work on Sonnigsburg,
there really hadn’t been any prime time supernatural shows on Australian
television. Since then, we’ve seen the first season of Glitch and the premiere of The
Kettering Incident. Instead of being first, our show is joining the
zeitgeist. Rural towns haunted by their pasts.
There was another key element that drove us to make some
decisions early on – we didn’t want our cast to look like the rest of
Australian television. We wanted to make sure we didn’t cast only white actors.
We didn’t want all our characters to be straight.
When you make a decision like this early on, it informs the
creative process. You write characters that reflect a wider Australian
experience. You tell stories that look new and feel different.
Writers never want to feel like their characters or stories
are ticking boxes, though. You want story to be paramount; but you also know
that television doesn’t reflect the faces or the sexualities you see in your
own life.
Making your lead character a woman isn’t particularly
revolutionary in Australia; we’ve done pretty well in the decades since Prisoner. We’ve got the Miss Fisher Mysteries, Janet King, The Wrong Girl and The Kettering Incident. And over the
past few years, there seems to be a push to put women front and centre on
television worldwide; it’s in Hollywood feature films where the lack of gender diversity
is most stark.
Then we decided to make her gay. Was there a gay lead female
character on Australian television before we started work on Sonnigsburg? I don’t think so. Janet
King existed on Crownies and then got
her own show in 2014. Australian television was changing.
There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few years about
diversity on stage and on screen. #OscarsSoWhite was the most prominent;
tackling the lack of diversity in Academy Award nominations. Both Hollywood and
our local industry have done surveys on diversity in front of and behind the
camera and it’s staggeringly one-sided.
There’s arguments made about having to train up the next
generation, but the Sonnigsburg
writers room felt like – as least as far as casting was concerned, the answer
was colour-blind. We would audition people from any background for our lead
roles. And though, in one case, we wrote a Sri Lankan character into our script, we were still open to changing his ethnicity, if it came down to it.
Much of our casting process was driven by one other factor;
we wanted to work with actors we’d never worked with before. We weren’t saying
no or never to casting actors from previous projects, but making the choice to
broaden our horizons was important for us creatively. It’s very easy to work
with the same people over and over; looking to bring in new voices is
important.
When we started the process of casting, we took a kind of
surgical approach; we didn’t cast a wide net by posting audition notices. We
approached some actors we knew but hadn’t worked with and invited them to audition.
We also looked at casting websites to find actors we’d never met and never heard of.
As with any casting, some decisions are easily made and some
are much tougher.
The first audition we held was with Dushan Philips, for the
role of Ashan. It was held in our writers’ room, which was at an office in Port
Melbourne in an industrial area. Dushan must have wondered what he was getting
himself into, venturing to that place at night. We’re so glad he made the trip,
because he made a great impression on us. It was such a relief to start the
audition process with a win.
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| Dushan Philips auditions for Ashan on Sonnigsburg |
Sonnigsburg has a
big cast. We wrote the role of Alfred for Don Bridges, a legendary Australian
character actor. We invited Ian Stenlake (Sea
Patrol, Stingers) to take part as
Frank.
But at the forefront of our minds, as it would be, was casting
the lead role of Savannah and her ex-girlfriend Jade. We knew what their
characters were like, but not what they looked like. They weren’t fixed in our
minds yet.
We auditioned lots of women; some for both roles. After a
couple of weeks, we had some tough choices to make. We had a lot of great
actors to choose from. We narrowed down our lists and had “second round”
auditions to test chemistry. We needed a Savannah and Jade that worked
together. We needed a Savannah who would feel like good friends with our Ashan.
In the end, we cast Ann Truong as Savannah Haskin. She
impressed us from the first moment we saw her, finding the right mix of
emotions for a character who is sometimes hard to read. And we were so lucky to
find her; she is amazing in the role and, not surprisingly, she’s worked on a
lot of other projects during the long production of our show.
Sonnigsburg may
not be Australia’s first supernatural drama or the first with a gay female lead
character. But it was important for us to make these decisions early; to help us
tell the story we wanted to tell and reflect the diversity we see in our
everyday lives.
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| Petra Elliott auditions for the role of Savannah before being cast as Jade |
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| Soren Jensen, auditioning for the role of Norman in Sonnigsburg |
